Trends in Customer Service Measurement Presentation to MAV October 2012

1. Trends in Customer Service Measurement Presentation to MAV October 2012 Note: The data and comment used in this report is for sample purpose only and does not represent actual data.

2. Today’s Topics • Why Customer Service is important in the local government • What Customer Service measures are used • Some case studies in local government • Financial ramifications of customer service • Trends • Benchmarking

3. What Does CSBA Do? • Helps Local Governments provide ‘value for money’ through a consistent customer service experience across all channels and departments. • Over 15 years experience helping over 60 councils on a regular basis to improve customer service. • Understands the council sector and the challenges faced in an increasingly demanding climate. • Committed to helping our clients: • Understand their customers’ expectations and experiences. • Measure and track their customer service. • Improve their customers’ experience. • Tried and tested framework for Customer Service measurement and improvement, mainly: • Mystery Shopping Benchmarking. • Customer Satisfaction Surveys. • Training and Consultancy.

4. Who Do CSBA Partner With? • Works with a wide range of council sector and other organisations, including:

5. What is Good or Bad Customer Service? • The difference between good and bad service starts with setting expectations. • A charter is a good place to start.

6. Customer Centric Organisation Set Customer Experience KPIs External - Customer Internal – Staff Customer Centric Organisation Charter Customer Experience Surveys Objective Assessment

7. The Experience Map is Continually Changing The experience has to be consistent across a range of channels Phone /IVR Web E-mail GAP ANALYSIS SMS Expectations from dealing with other organisations Branch Customer Needs Social Media Letter Actual Experience of dealing with council Mobile

8. How do Customers Contact their Council? Over two in three interactions are still by phone or in person • Customers still choose to contact via telephone and in person. • If offering email, text message or Chat, resources must be provided to ensure that customer queries are responded to in a timely fashion. • There has to be a clear win for both the customer and the council to swapping channels. Source: DPCD Survey

9. The Customer Satisfaction Measures • NPS • Good for organisations where Word of Mouth is important. • Ease of dealing with • Excellent for getting clarity on drivers. • First call resolution • Excellent for local government.

10. The Customer Satisfaction Measures • Customer Effort Score • Works well for end to end process transaction e.g. setting up an account. • Common Measurement Tool • Designed for all levels of Government. • How satisfied were you with the overall quality of service delivery? • Victorian State Government measures • Measures customer satisfaction.

11. How Does Customer Satisfaction Vary by Channel? Customers are more satisfied via telephone and in person • Customers are the most satisfied when they can interact using the telephone and in person, and via the website for simple queries such as FAQs. • They are less satisfied when they write, either via email or letter, and CSBA experience shows that correspondence is often late, poorly responded to or lost altogether. Satisfaction with Channel Source: DPCD Survey Thinking of the most recent contact, how would you rate Council for customer service?

12. Some Measurement Case Studies • City of Sydney • Assess every touchpoint over the year (over 1000 assessments). • Feedback goes to internal and external and is driven by the CEO. • City of Greater Geelong • Ongoing assessment of the touchpoints. • Conducts journey mapping of a range of key touchpoints. • Adelaide City Council • Conducts NPS on a regular basis. • Just starting to do External Quality Assurance of calls.

13. Financial Ramifications First Call Resolution: How many times have you called about this issue? For the average call centre SQM benchmarks, a 1% improvement in their FCR performance equals $276,000 in annual operational savings

14. Financial Ramifications (cont’d) Top Performers Earn Best-in-Class Status Source: Aberdeen Group, June 2008

15. Trends • Trend 1 • Development in performance metrics. • Moving away from Customer Satisfaction to more relevant measures like First Call Resolution. • Trend 2 • Companies are turning to technology solutions (IVR and email). • Trend 3 • Focus is on the consistency across all Touchpointse.g. phone, face to face, email and web.

16. Trends (cont’d) • Trend 4 • Customer Service Training is being measured for its effectiveness. • Previously there were no measures to see if it made a difference. • Trend 5 • Customer Satisfaction is being linked more to mystery shopping to give front line staff ‘line of sight’. • The market research department results are being used by operations (e.g. training in listening skills). • Trend 6 • Funds being used for Satisfaction measurement are increasingly scrutinised and must deliver a clear & measurable ROI.

17. Benchmarking For the last 10 years CSBA has been reporting on these soft issues The CSBA Customer Satisfaction Grid Position for 15 different industries for 2012 (January to March)

18. CSBA Customer Satisfaction Grid position For the last 10 years CSBA has been reporting on these soft issues The CSBA Customer Satisfaction Grid Position for 48 councils for April to June 2012 City of Greater Geelong was the highest scoring council for this period with a Grid Score of 191 (100,91) City of Greater Geelong

19. Executive Summary Council website assessments • CSBA conducted website assessments for all councils in Victoria (commissioned by the Essential Services Commission). • Inconsistency in the quality of information, harder to use. • If trying to encourage customers to use the website rather than other channels, it has to be well laid out and extremely easy to use. Out of 79 Councils in Victoria – only half are providing Value for Money from their website Significant reduction in calls Source: CSBA report to ESC August 2011

20. Summary • Good service starts with setting clear service expectations and setting a charter. • Customer satisfaction scores can be a mix of scores and purposes. • Be clear on the objective of any satisfaction or MS measurement. • Make sure you have the resources to action changes. • Internal Quality Assurance must reflect what is important to the community and give employees ‘line of sight’. • Benchmarking provides you with a reality check on your service comparison and consistency.

21. Any Questions? Any Questions? Customer Service Benchmarking Australia Level 5, 10-16 Queens Street Melbourne VIC 3000 T:+613 9605 4917 | F:+613 9642 1741 www.csba.com.au Paul van Veenendaal